Supporting openness in higher education across Virginia

Minding the Future Program

2:30-3:00 Alan Levine’s “Memorable/Unmemorable”
If asked whether they would like to be remembered, almost no one would answer “No”. But multiple choice questions can be trickier than they seem. The education future some are painting for us is a path focused on a destination, reached via an unmemorable journey.

3:00 -3:30 Kin Lane’s “Access, Interoperability, Privacy and Security Of Technology Will Set The Stage For The Future of Education”
The future of education will be fueled by the access and interoperability introduced by common, everyday web and mobile applications that our children use in school and at home, and we depend on as adults in our workplaces and personal lives. By providing proper access and interoperability in applications, bundled with the healthy education of end-users around these features, and fully respecting user’s privacy and security, technologists can help define the future of education and evolve the next generation of citizens who are web literate by default, and never stop learning, creating and sharing.

3:30 – 4:00: Audrey Watters’s “A Future with Only 10 Universities”
Sebastian Thrun’s claims that in 50 years, we’ll only have 10 institutions “delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.” What (horror) has to happen in order to get us to “ten.”

4:00 – 4:30 David Wiley’s “Staying Relevant in the Future of Education”
The world and the academy are pulling further and further apart along a number of key dimensions. Many of these differences can be traced to an increased commitment to the principle of openness in society that has not been reflected in formal education. In order for colleges and universities to survive and thrive in the future, we must understand the principle of openness, the changes it implies for our practice, and establish openness as a bedrock principle underlying all that we do in education.

4:30 – 5:00: Gardner Campbell’s “Observable Work in an Age of Disruption: A Challenge for the EdTech Tribe”
Jon Udell has written eloquently of our time’s unprecedented opportunities for generating, sharing, and learning from what he calls “observable work,” a crucial learning resource for a potentially global audience, much of it in need of precisely these kinds of resources. In such circumstances, observable work rises to the level of an ethical imperative: if we can make at least some part of our work observable, we should. With these ideas as context, this session takes up the question of what kind of observable work should emerge from those of us who work, loosely speaking, in the area of learning technologies empowered by interactive, personal, networked computers.

Jon Udell’s “Observable work and the reinvention of apprenticeship”
For most of human history the work of the world was directly observable. A young person saw, and often participated in, the farming and the hunting and the building. Then the adults vanished from the scene. They had all gone to the factory or the office. Work became opaque to the young.
Now work is again becoming observable. Increasingly both the processes and products of work are represented digitally, in ways that can enable learners and practitioners to connect. Will universities nurture those connections?

This panel will include all of the day’s speakers responding to a wide variety of questions—a sampling of whcih can be found below:

What have been the most exciting developments in higher education over the last 5 years?

What will be the most exciting developments in higher education in the next 5 years?What developments concern you?

Who are the major players (people, institutions, businesses, foundations) in the digitally enabled higher education landscape? What are their goals? Who pays for this transformation?

What role does the defunding of higher education, especially at the state level, have to do with these changes?

What is the role of the state and federal government in these conversations? What is it likely to be, going forward?

Business and technology leaders have been telling those of us in higher education that we have our heads in the sand, that MOOCS in particular are going to wash over us and we will be out of business. So, do public institutions of higher education have their collective heads in the sand when it comes to MOOCs, online learning, and “electronic delivery revolution”? If so, what are we missing and why?